Everything on this system runs in RAM after the first read. I took the 4 magnetic drives out for the sake of quiet. Since there are cores to spare and 4.0 Ghz clock I have 3 desktops open with a dozen Firefox/Chrome windows each (with many tabs in each) and lots of PDFs and there is still RAM to spare. In my youth I put more money into "the fastest processor" and "the best possible video card" only to find most of my annoyances were from storage latencies and noise.

FTA:...biggest problem is that people allegedly still can’t use Hadoop... Hadoop is still too expensive for firms...

Hadoop is an ecosystem with lots of moving parts. Those are real problems above, but Spark (Particle) is not a stand alone replacement for an ecosystem the size of Hadoop. Moreover it has no problem running integrating with Yarn on Hadoop where you can run Hbase, Cassandra, MongoDB, Rainstor, Flume, Storm, R, Mahout and plenty of other Yarn-compatible goodies.

It's also worth noting that Hortonworks and Cloudera may not be "taking off as hoped" because the branded big-iron players are finally in the ring. They hide the (rather hideous) complexity and integrate well with any existing systems you have with those vendors. Teradata for instance has a Hadoop/Aster integration that's impressive and turn key. They bought Rainstor, and will soon have it integrated, and that's Spark-fast and hassle free. IBM's BigInsights is very impressive if you have the means.

So, no, Hadoop is in no danger of being replaced. The value proposition that my $4.2M cluster outperformed two $6M "big name" vendor supported appliances is undeniable, but only that stark when your $'s have an M suffix. What will probably occur though is that we'll end up replacing every component in Hadoop with a faster one, and MapReduce will become a memory as things like Spark and Hive/Tez move away from that methodology.

But the doom-saying is inappropriate:FTA: "Otherwise, it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner."

Among the problems with this conclusion, the most egregious seems to be: Android is used in a way that Windows and IOS are not. People use it for lower-grade hardware that they are still manufacturing today. Go buy a $39 "unlocked" phone at your local Fry's (search for a brand like Blu). What will it be running? Android 2.3. Which is wonderful. They are calling this "fragmentation," but it's really people who could never spend the money for a $400 dollar phone finally getting access to one to what was a $400 phone 5 years ago. It can't run the latest O/S, but that's fine. The 2.x series phones (like my beloved Motorola Cliq) were really quite functional.

Dear Lucian (article author): Not everyone in the world is rich. That does not mean there is a "critical problem" that Google needs to address.

Yes. It would be great if Android kept major version trees alive and patched, like we do with the Linux kernel, and if all the manufacturers built their their complete phone stack from Puppet scripts, so they could get an Android update, rebuild against it, retest against real hardware and reissue the complete O/S for scant money in a few days.

They don't. If you want to make this happen it won't come from Google. It will come from us, the consumers walking into [insert generic carrier name] and asking which phone manufacturer got the greatest number of updates, after launch, for their top end phone. If the number is 3 refuse to buy from them.

When the stores know that is a selling point, they'll push back. Right now the people in that store and the manufacturer benefit most by selling you a new phone as soon as the old one is paid off. Until we change that evolutionary pressure, they will remain correctly adapted to our behaviour.

To anyone who has a shred of fear of flying, the game of "screwing with the pilots for laughs" is not fucking funny.

FTA, "Roberts said he had met with the Denver office of the FBI two months ago and was asked to back off from his research on avionics – a request he said he agreed to."

So he's scaring people and breaking/threatening-to-break his word, and they're being dicks to him. This may not be statutory justice, but it's poetic.

On the irrelevant issue of his research turning up vulnerabilities and the manufacturer's response being "shhhhhh, maybe no one will notice," I'd be completely on his side if he wanted to go on TV and talk about it with the world. I would contribute to his legal defense fund if he was in this for the good fight.

But if his frustration with Boeing and Airbus is going to drive him to be a fear-mongering troll, then any inconvenience caused him by the FBI seems utterly fair.

The question every person in authority should be in the habit of asking is: "Am I using the least amount of my authority possible to accomplish my immediate goals?"

To get a peace officer badge, A Clockwork Orange should be mandatory viewing with a discussion to follow, and an arrest for not understanding it. I think peace officers who don't understand the point of that movie are at least as likely to commit serious crimes as 8th graders who tamper with screen savers. I'm willing to be proven wrong.

When I have a sufficiently enlightened legislative branch that all members know the difference between Guyana and Guinea, then I'll let them decide the engineering constraints for proper safeguards on autonomous agents and their effectors.

Today the rule for preventing the robot apocalypse is: if a robot can kill people, bolt it to the floor. Seriously, a second robot can bring it things to lase, and chop and mash; you don't have to add the lasers and the chainsaws to the combat hardened roving vehicle and hope the rules generated by the congressional oversight committee will keep us all safe.

See now, you're exactly the kind of person who should be armed. I agree.

>Unfortunately the track record of citizens stopping crime with guns is poor.

It's actually quite excellent, but the path to that determination is extremely complicated. I do not fault someone who starts with your beliefs for coming to opposite conclusion based on the available evidence.

The problem isn't you, and I don't think it's a flaw with my grasp of stats. either. It is very hard for anyone to measure the number of problems prevented by any factor unless they turn that factor on and off and measure the results in both states, in the same place. Fire is a good example. Fire extinguishers prevent almost zero fires every year. Since they are only generally applied to existing fires, the fires are not prevented. A judgement call is made by the humans that the fire extinguisher made a postitive difference in the situation, and in nearly all the cases where a personal fire extinguisher put out the flame, the fire goes unreported. This plays HELL with any fire statistics gathering. Now imagine if fire extinguishers could occasionally be abused to start fires. Given our poor inputs on how many fires that extinguishers "keep from getting worse" how could we measure that scientifically against how many they start to see if they are a net benefit?

Given the above I would state: It is hard to solve the macro scale math that would determine the appropriate level of firearms distribution for maximum positive effect.

You can solve this problem on the micro scale though. You can take a couple local policemen to lunch (btw: steaks work better than donuts) ask them about the local crime, and then go to a defensive-weapons trainer and ask him about the tools that are effective against those classes of crime. It might be there aren't any and guns are just useless where you live (e.g. Maui); might be that you're a fool to step outside unarmed (Seven Mile Rd., 3:00 a.m. Detroit).

I've helped a non-statistically valid sample of people in the triple digits with this problem. The overwhelmingly popular solution: Pepper spray. Not any; the good shit, found here:http://www.kimberamerica.com/p...

Dominating reason: Nice people hesitate to shoot bad people. It's just not something they learn to do easily. (Weird, eh?) But considerably less hesitation comes with a non-permanent solution. And less hesitation means substantially more effectiveness.

And that's the problem, your belief system. You asked the right question: Why own one? So you may not be married to that system. But then you discount the best reason and the most frequently occuring application.

If you were asking your question honestly, then you probably have no attraction to violence, and are enormously likely to be a good person. Therefore, you can probably say with certainty that you'd never shoot school children with your gun. But you'd probably be willing to shoot someone trying to shoot school children with a gun.

It's you I want to arm. Seriously. It's people like you, with no attraction to violence that should lug around: a paramedic kit, a fire extinguisher, and a firearm for just those emergencies where seconds make the difference. In any other case, you would leave the problem to the ambulance crew, the fire crew or the police, but countless lives are saved every year by people who had the skills and tools to step into one of these varieties of tragedy and stop innocent people from being hurt. You can too.

If people being paid for their skills are assumed to be the only ones that have them, there would be no Linux.

Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Thursday March 28, 2013 @05:11PM
from the bending-the-rules dept.

Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"